An absolutely remarkable film...

Rating: 10/10 (1 October 2002)

'The Longest Day' is June 6, 1944, the day the Allied assault on Hitler's Fortress Europe... And when it came everything went much according to plan... But fighting through the tough country of Normandy took much longer than had been expected...
Dwight D. Eisenhower, the four-star Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, made up the force of some two million men massed in England for the strike at Europe...
Combined American, British, Irish and Canadian forces assault the beaches of Normandy in an effort to gain a foothold on the continent... From the viewpoint of the Americans and Germans involved, the story unfolds through numerous episodes highlighting the 'Longest Day.' We see the commands posts occupied by the Germans; Caen, the starting point; the French underground network; Omaha Beach; Utah Beach; Ste-Mère-Église; as well as sites and camps in England...
The film is a clear examination of D-Day looked at from almost every viewpoint, particularly from that of the Germans who are overwhelmed by the forces brought against them... It is in fact Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (profiled against the French beach thoroughly planted with mined obstacles) who looks out to where the invasion fleet will appear later-or sooner, and gives the film its title: "The first 24 hours of the invasion will be decisive... For the Allies as well as the Germans, it will be the longest day."
In the first half, much attention is focused on the weather, as the troops... American, British, Irish, Canadian and French are poised on board their boats and ships, waiting for the rain to stop... In the key scene when Gen. Eisenhower (David Grace), makes the decision to go ahead with the invasion on June 6, more than 5,000 ships moved to assigned positions... The importance of time is emphasized by increasing the ticking of a clock... On the other side of the channel, the German generals, who know the invasion is imminent, see the same nasty weather and decide to take some time off for war games...
French Resistance fighters receive their coded instructions from BBC radio and increase their sabotage activities... Much of the early going is also devoted to some of the Allies' more unorthodox ideas, the kinds of things that make more sense cinematic ally than militarily: the use of metal clickers by paratroopers for identification, and parachuting mechanical dummies loaded with firecrackers behind German lines to create confusion...
The film reaches its peak when the two sides in the battle are finally engaged...
The first assault wave hit the Normandy beaches at 6:30 A.M. on June 6... The soil of France looked sordid and uninviting... Planning has been as complete as possible, but in the vast confusion of invasion under enemy fire, so many men fell uselessly when they left their landing craft, and stepped into water... Others fell into underwater shell craters and drowned...
The Allied air bombing that was to have knocked out German beach defense guns had not been accurate, especially on Omaha Beach where the bombs had been laid down too far inland to do much good... As a result, the gunfire that met American troops there was more murderous than anything they had been prepared for..
Today it is difficult to watch the invasion scenes and not compare them to the opening of Steven Spielberg's 'Saving Private Ryan,' but that really is unfair... Zanuck manages to display the image of thousands of young soldiers who were killed fighting to liberate France...
A long aerial shot from the point of view of a German pilot Josef 'Pips' Priller (Heinz Reincke) strafing Normandy Beach reveals a shore-line of successive waves of men running for their lives trying to secure Omaha Beach... This awful waste and destruction of war: scores of trucks and boats hit by shells, or sunk by mines with their crew lost... Trucks overturned and swamped, partly sunken barges, and many jeeps half submerged...
Field Marshal Rommel set to work to do everything possible to make the beaches if not impregnable, very uninviting indeed... 'The war will be won or lost on the beaches,' he states... The German command was slow to react to the invasion... They had been misled by the weather and the Allied deception plan that Normandy was a diversion and the main landing would be at Pas-de-Calais...
Shot in CinemaScope and in black-and-white, 'The Longest Day' captures the history of the moment... The film tracks the book very closely, shifting the viewpoints from German to French to American to British throughout... In three hours Zanuck and his staff expand on the scope of one day, to tell mostly everything, with an exceptionally strong cast playing cameo roles... The cast could not be better, in spite of the brevity of their roles:

Bourvil is the French Mayor of Colleville who welcomes the British soldiers with a bottle of champagne...

Irina Demick is Janine Boitard, the sexy good-looking Resistance member...

Henry Fonda is Theodore Roosevelt Jr., the Brigadier General who limps ashore with the first of the assault boats landing on Utah Beach...

Christian Marquand is Philippe Kieffer, the French Commander in desperate situation in Ouistreham...

Robert Mitchum is Norman Cota, the Brigadier general who chops on his cold cigar, and walks along the beach and rallies his men... Mitchum gets some great lines and delivers them with the right amount of idealism and cynicism...

Richard Todd is John Howard, the major who lands by glider at Bénouville to capture the canal bridge over the Orne River...

All the characters speak in their own languages... The motion picture is Winner of two Academy Awards for Cinematography and Special Effects, Zanuck's 'The Longest Day' is one without doubt an absolutely remarkable film, one of the most impressive and most authentic documentation of war ever put on film...